Yes, there's inner beauty and self-acceptance, but after years of ridicule, an ugly duckling discovers something she'd never seen before: herself

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From as early as I can remember, I knew I was ugly. When I was five, my mother took me to a filming of the TV show Rom-per Room and I refused to look at the camera. In kindergarten, I shrank and whispered my answers. By third grade, I was being taunted on the playground and in the halls; my last name (unfortunately, Boris) became synonymous with pig.

Junior high school was one long bad day. I couldn't blend in, so I tried to disappear—first, hiding behind the stage curtains and in certain restrooms and stairwells. Then, starving myself, getting down to 68 pounds before my parents and doctors called a halt to that nonsense, putting me in the hospital and pumping me full of liquid food.

I was raised in a wealthy suburb 20 miles west of Minneapolis, where the girls were tall and slender, mostly Scandinavian, and overwhelmingly blond. They had tiny noses and smooth tanned skin. There were three black students in our 3,000-person high school. No Hispanics. Maybe four or five Jews. What puzzled me was that I was too different, but not quite different enough. The West African exchange student—with her dark black skin and piercings in unusual places—was seen as striking and sought after. But I, with my curly red-brown hair, large nose, and small, portly body, most closely resembled the special-ed students who'd recently been mainstreamed and suffered nonstop abuse.

There were exceptions—notably a studly swimmer with a John Travolta smile who put an end to the ridicule anytime he was around. The boy was stunningly good-looking and bizarrely kind. Once he walked me all the way home and told me not to listen to them, that I was beautiful, better than all those other girls. I thought he was wonderful but insane.

I left high school early. Not just because of the bullying, but I have to admit it played a part. I was always the ugly duckling. I wasn't athletic or social or gifted at anything but academics. I played the violin for a while and made one friend, a large Finnish blond named Eva. But she soon had a boyfriend and couldn't hang out anymore. I was bewildered. Other than the swimmer, who seemed to have disappeared from our school, no boy had ever spoken to me other than to jeer.

Once I got out in the world, things improved. I moved to an apartment in Minneapolis and worked as a bus girl at a hotel restaurant off the highway. My parents—decent, loving people—made one last, frantic attempt to get me back home and in school, then finally just let me go. My roommate was a wild, tall Nordic girl from high school who'd agreed to drop out with me, as if it were a party we were planning. She worked at Target. Sometimes we'd invite strange men over at night.

We were like toddlers playing with roadside bombs. It never occurred to us that someone might hurt us, that the men who came through with their one-hitters and six-packs of cheap beer could be dangerous. Besides, the one or two times I felt at risk—it was invigorating, thrilling.

"What's with your nose?" one of the waitresses at the restaurant asked in the break room. "Are you…Jewish?"

I shrugged and nodded, though it was only half true. My father was Jewish, my mother German Catholic.

"That explains it," she said, carefully tipping the end of her cigarette. "All you Jews have big schnozzes."

One night, after my roommate had taken a 25-year-old trucker to bed, I sat in the living room with Monty, his long-haired friend. "I get you," Monty slurred as he cracked open his fifth beer and squinted. I was 16; he was perhaps 30. "We're the same, you and me. We're both too ugly for anyone to love."

The next year, I went to a midwestern college and was surrounded again by tall, wholesome kids. My only college boyfriend was a frat boy who refused to be seen with me in public. We went to parties where he'd stand across the room, guffawing with his guy friends, while I pretended to enjoy the music. Afterward, once we'd returned to our respective rooms, he'd call. I'd go to his room—furtively, checking to see if anyone was around before knocking—and climb into his bed.

There were other boys who were genuinely interested in me: a shy music major, and a studious electrical engineering student who lived down the hall. But at 17, I was stubbornly certain I could overcome my childhood legacy. I kept on, doggedly trying to win over the guy who reminded me of the ones back home. It was a demeaning few years, but eventually I found the wherewithal to dump him and vowed never again to give a moment's time to a man who treated me badly.

At 21, I married a brawny, small-town carpenter who had been captivated by me at first glance. This wasn't enough to build a lifetime around, however. Though we had three children and he treated me kindly for the 14 years we were together, we were fatally ill matched. We divorced in 2003, the same year I began writing for national magazines—publications that inevitably asked for a photo to accompany my essays. And that's when the taunts began again.

All my life, the world of men has been divided. There are those, like Monty, who see me as ugly; and though few of them come right out and say it, they tend to make their opinions clear. But there is—like that sweet, long-ago swimmer—a smaller percentage who find me riveting. They tell me so, they follow me, they strike up conversations on buses.

I immediately know when I meet one of the first type; I can see it in his eyes. Back when I was single, blind dates would look right through me or over my head. They mentioned Barbra Streisand with astonishing frequency. Sometimes, when a man introduced me to his friends I'd catch a few strangled looks and eye rolls, gestures that I knew in my 12-year-old heart meant, "Really? He couldn't do any better?"

It hurt and surprised me every time. And it caused the same undoing as stepping on a doctor's scale to discover a previously undetected six-pound weight gain: I might leave the house feeling fantastic—well-dressed and sleek—only to be reduced to monstrous by one sidelong look.

In general the group that is repelled by me includes machinists, Masons, accountants, academics, CEOs, Lutherans, and Canadians. The one that's attracted consists of African-Americans, plumbers, musicians, scientists, and—this one confounds me—guys in their late twenties. I know, for instance, that if I go to the Y in a gritty urban neighborhood, men will hang on my elliptical machine, talking to me. But if I head for a gym on the outskirts—such as the carefully landscaped suburb where I was raised—they'll elbow me out of the way.

My eyes are blue, my skin alabaster, and my hair auburn, but I have the prominent nose, wide face, and full mouth of the Eastern Bloc. Viewed straight on, I can appear aristocratic, but glimpsed (or photographed) from the side, my face is craggy, almost Picasso-like. I spent years experimenting with shading powders and putties, but eventually I got tired of smearing beige swaths on my clothes and pillowcases. Finally I made peace with my appearance. More or less.

Around 38, I gave up on pretty and went for authentic. I quit wearing makeup and started dressing in a way that felt right to me, no longer covering up in apology for the fact that I'm barely 5'3" and small-boned (but stacked). I developed a uniform: black pants, camisoles, bright sweaters; occasionally a skirt that would show off my legs, which are quite nice. My hair, forever unruly and starting to silver, seemed to look best piled on top of my head.

None of it mattered. People still responded to me in wildly different ways: Some assumed I was in my fifties; others remonstrated when I said I had teenagers, saying I was far too young. I'd gotten used to the fact that people simply couldn't parse my face, and most of the time I was okay with it.

I still got overlooked at faculty meetings full of Polo-wearing PhDs. But after my divorce, I dated a series of men who were pretty hot by middle-aged intellectual standards: an angsty yet brilliant Jewish writer, a well-known radio personality, a Cuban singer and storyteller, a conservative research chemist who couldn't keep his hands off me from the moment we met.

None of these relationships lasted, however. And one night I found myself on an Internet dating site recommended by a friend. I posted a photo. And when asked to describe myself, I wrote: "I have the plain, serious face of an English professor (which I happen to be) and the body of a biker chick." Truth in advertising.

Six hours later, I heard from John.

He was, from the beginning, a type-two man. John, with his chiseled Baptist preacher's face, swooned at my large eyes and mouth, prominent nose, and buxom shape. Even when his Harley-riding friends sneered, he was unmoved. We were married within six months.

This time we had more in common than his strange predilection for my looks and my boundless appreciation for that. We shared interests and goals, a love for travel, ambition. He loved my writing as much as he loved me. Despite our outward differences, I felt as if we belonged together. And in 2009, I wrote an essay called "Finding Love at 40" that was published alongside a small photo of us.

Looking back, I remember a moment's pause before I sent in the piece. I was afraid of what people would say. But then I told myself I was being ridiculous, childish; we were mature and grown past playground insults. I was wrong.

I found the first note after a holiday party. I was comfortably tipsy when I fired up my e-mail but quickly went cold. At nine o'clock that night, while I'd been drinking port by the glow of a friend's fireplace, someone in Phoenix sent this thought: "You're a hag who looks like your husband's mother, and my wife agrees. He will leave you soon."

I stood over my computer, sobering fast and feeling exactly the way I had as a studious, wrong-faced girl cringing through the halls of my junior high. Suddenly, I was nauseated, panicked. And it wasn't the cruelty that bothered me. It was this: If someone had taken the time to find my personal e-mail address and write this note, what he said must be true.

This is not the sort of thing you can tell your husband. "Hey, sweetheart, I got this e-mail saying I'm a hideous hag and you should leave me. So what do you think?"

Instead I pulled on a nightshirt and got into bed feeling like a scaly reptile, told John I was tired, and turned toward the wall. But I hardly slept.

The next day was Saturday. I avoided the computer until early afternoon, knowing I'd reread the note as soon as I sat down. By the time I logged on, however, there was a second e-mail, this one from New Jersey.

"Are you ever a PIG!" it began.

Over the next week another half dozen such messages trickled in. Three were overtly anti-Semitic, one of them calling me "an Aryanodomizing Sodomite Jew." Those were easier to take; they were hate mail and culturally unacceptable. But the ones that simply skewered my appearance? There aren't any taboos against that.

I grew increasingly remote and distant from my husband, though I couldn't tell him why. Then, one night in the last few days of the year, we watched a film set in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. My husband gripped my hand through the entire thing and wept.

As we got into bed that night, he ran one finger down the length of my nose and said, "You look like those people in the movie tonight." He paused. I could barely breathe. "Do you know this is the first thing that attracted me to you? It was so, I don't know, exotic—unlike any other woman I knew."

I knew he was telling the truth. Because what he said applies in reverse. John was one of seven children raised on a farm in the deep South. A computer scientist and mathematician, he's spent years correcting the drawl that he says makes people treat him like a hick. But when it slips out, when he's excited or angry, I find it fascinating. He and his ways are as foreign to me as if he were from Bangladesh.

Still, there were moments of discomfort. We'd be getting ready for a party or an event with John's colleagues; I would look at him, so refined in his handsome dark suit, and take a deep breath.

Two years passed, during which my husband turned 50. Skinny all his life, he finally developed a comfortably padded, middle-aged body. Laugh lines fanned his piercing eyes. He wore bifocals on a chain around his neck. And as he visibly aged, losing the boyish look that had sparked outrage from my Internet haters, I began to relax.

In 2011, we marked our fifth anniversary. And when I sold my second novel around the same time, we celebrated both events with a tour of Europe that culminated with a week in Budapest.

Evening fell sharply there, which, I discovered, is the reason Hungarian women wear so many layers. The weather cracks at dusk, going rapidly from springtime sun to an ice blue cold, so skirts and shawls and long, winding scarves are essential.

Thus, I was dressed as a native the night we attended the opera: a long black skirt, leather boots, and floor-length cape. It was intermission. John was in the men's room and I was waiting for him, when I turned and found myself looking into a full-length mirror. And I saw something I'd never seen before: myself, in a sea of women who looked just like me.

Part of it was the clothing. We were nearly all in black with trails of fabric wound around our shoulders and necks. But it was also the face, the form. Everywhere I looked in that lighted glass, there were women with large features, deep-set eyes, rounded cheeks, riotous hair, and delicate-yet-meaty little bodies. We were, in other words, an army of ugly people.

Only, for the first time in my memory, we weren't. I wasn't. I was normal, even conventionally attractive. Stylish. Interesting. Sexy. Simply that.

I stood in front of that mirror in the Hungarian State Opera House, watching couples mill. Men holding the arms and hands of dozens of women who could've been my sisters, mother, and daughters, tipping their heads back, kissing them lightly, gazing with naked admiration at faces like mine.

Then John was behind me, his reflection in the glass all Southern gentleman: tall and broad, with a ten-gallon hat. And I saw without question how perfect we look together.

He leaned down to kiss me, and the lobby lights flickered. Intermission was over. I tucked one hand in the crook of his elbow, and together we went back in.

Ann Bauer is the author of The Forever Marriage, out now from Overlook Press.